Reading Linux

Open source is a good thing and all but has anyone ever worried about what it could possibly do to the world of programmers and their trade?
I mean has anybody ever worried about whether or not it could do bad things to the industry? It could easily be abusedby everyone and industrial programming as we know it could become obsolete. Which is what I am currently going to school for. Now in all of my worry I do see good things happening for the GPL as well but it could seriously change the industry and put many out of the job and I PLAN on working in that feild. Any comments on why it would or would not happen would be appreciated.

I should be ashamed of myself.

My .02:
I'm currently working as a programmer. Altho I believe that OSS takes away some market share from some software companies, I'm not worried about losing my job. That's because the company I work for makes highly customized software, for tasks where there simply is no OSS. While some software people might lose their job to OSS, I don't believe in the MS horror stories of the whole software industry collapsing. The industry will merely change from mainstream programming to custom solutions or support for OSS.

When life hands you a lemon, that's 40% of your RDA of vitamin C taken care of.

The industry will merely change from mainstream programming to custom solutions or support for OSS.

Yep! Exactly my opinion, too! And exactly the same as what I'm trying to do: I'm using Open Source-based programs to create very customized solutions for Websites, eg. by taking WordPress and turning it into a nearly full-blown CMS, partially adding static pages - internally, to myself, I call it WordPress CMS. I already re-worked a full page based on it - excluding the shop system, which is based entirely on my own planning and sources, but very easy to customize - which you can find at: http://www.candies-boutique.de

The next one I'm creating this way is the all-new website of a small metal festival in Munich, called Metal Meridian-Festival, which will be up in the next 1-2 days. The current version (and also the new, as soon as I get it online) can be found at: http://www.metal-meridian.de

cu, w0lf.

beards are cool. every villain has one!

Several of my freinds theorize that in five years all system software will be open source.
I believe this and I am sort of still worried. I would hate to be useless after my college training. But I guess I can be an open source programmer and do the GPL thing, but I would also like to live a comfortable life and afford that qaud opteron, refrigerated cased, 80 gigabyte 10k rpm raid 5, everything about is overkill rig....

I should be ashamed of myself.

This post was edited by Aynjell on Jun 23, 2004.

But I guess I can be an open source programmer and do the GPL thing

Well, OSS hasnt killed Unix, but made it RISE like hell .. and btw: there is not only the Gnu Public License, there are LOTS OF licenses out there, several including things like "available only for NON-commercial use@ etc., thus enabling you to use your product still in a commercial way whilst opening it to the folks who just want to set it up at home or a university, which is the number one problem with closed source software: you have to pay for every- and anything! And you're not even allowed to change or finetune it!

I'm not developing this thought further, because I think my dear fellow NAOis are going to know by themselves in which direction this does go ;) Think for yourself, folks! ;)

cu, w0lf.

beards are cool. every villain has one!

Development houses that produce software for which usable open source alternatives are becoming available are bound to take some heavy hits. However, most money in the software development business is not being made with packaged boxes (Microsoft products aside) but custom or specialized solutions - correct me if I'm wrong.

For numerous reason I don't believe open source software is ever going to pose a threat to that kind of business. Actually it has become possible to offer such solutions at a much more competitive by building on top of free open source infrastructure.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Well thank you guys. That was just a worry on my mind. So if nobody thinks it will hurt commercial software design than I will eliminate it from my mind it was just a fear.

Thanks you guys.

Anyway I was reading a book that is fundamental in one of my classes, or more so skimming through, and they quoted the original author of the GPL in an article about software piracy.
Now, I am not saying that he doesn't commit piracy or that he does(I believe that he doesn't) however, the fact that the school book referenced him like that kind of irritated me.

I guess I am not the expert nor do I claim to be but the simple fact remains, from my experiences open source is a damn good thing and the fact that they would put him in a negative light like that kind of made me think back to arguments about bad doctrine the the school place.

has anyone seen Inherit the Wind!?!

I should be ashamed of myself.

I recommend that whatever job U eventually take, U take because U love doing it, not because it has the potential to make buckets of money. If that's what U want, import illegal substances into the U.S.; we have major appetites here for them, so the market is probably the world's largest, and best of all, U don't have to worry about paying taxes.

OK, let's get serious and take a look at the world of closed-source; I've been writing code in it for almost thirty years, so I know a little bit about the process.

Typically, a manager near the top will decide what the product is going to be. He then goes to his subordinates, who are also managers (for the most part), and works out a few of the top-level details with them. In the tech world, the prez and his subordinate managers are often tech guys, so they aren't dummies or newbies, and they carefully consider all the options. They haven't actually been down in the trenches for quite a few years, however, so if they have any smarts, they just outline the new product and leave the details to those who are in closer touch with the state of the art.

Next, the Plan travels further down the feeding chain for fleshing out. At this point, a lot of detail is undecided, and politics comes into play as various managers and organizations jockey for advantage. In any organization with more than one person, politics is an inevitable part of business. It's just part of being human; it can't be avoided, because parasitics are part of _any_ real-world process, including human organizations. In any case, the decisions that are now made are not directed by just one individual, and many times do not have the benefit of the customer or end user in mind. This is the first place where major errors can be introduced into the process.

At some point, the folks who write the code are finally turned loose to write the code. Most real-world projects are large enough that in order to maintain a viable schedule, the project has to be divided up into modules and farmed out to teams. In other words, only a few of the grunts will have the 'big picture.' If the organization is effective, a product specification will have been at least partly written at this point, with the details to be finalized by the grunts. Coding begins, and changes are made to both code and specification (but far more often to the former than the latter if it's done right) until the alpha, then beta tests are run.

At every point in the cycle, there are careful checks of the code against the specifications, and everybody involved will give input...

... But this is the ideal. What if somebody has a grudge against his boss and puts in a backdoor? What if he's the best coder and is able to BS his co-workers into not checking an important segment too closely? Or what if somebody is running behind and has an unreasonable boss, and decides to put in some code he wrote while working for another employer? He wrote it, it looks like his code to his fellow workers (because it is), but it belongs to another company, nobody there knows it's purloined code, and since THERE WILL BE NO OUTSIDE REVIEW, it will most likely never be found.

Of course, everybody knows that this sort of thing Never Happens. Trust Us when we tell U that Our Code is Most Excellent. Of course.

As for myself, I like open source. There is money to be made in it, both from a coding standpoint and a service standpoint (just ask Red Hat, Suse (Novell), and IBM). Best of all from a professional programming standpoint, the code is out there in front of God and Everybody, and if any of it is stolen, I would be an idiot to put it into public view. There's quite an incentive to keep it honest, and I'm sure that's the way most programmers would like to see it.

Finally, an awful lot of programmers write code for love of coding (I certainly do). Just write the shell of a piece of code and put it out on the web, and I guarantee U'll get not just opinions on how to improve it, U'll actually get the patches to make it better. Best of all from society's viewpoint, if an idiot project maintainer starts to ruin a project by taking it in the wrong direction, anybody else in the world can use his own copy of the code and start another project that goes in the right direction. Conversely, if an idiot manager in a closed-source organization takes the product in the wrong direction, the programmers reporting to him have no choice but to implement the changes, regardless of what they may believe or want (ever hear of 'employment at will?').

Another analogy is locks on house doors: They are there more to keep honest people, not crooks, out of the house. If the door is unlocked and open, a good guy might be tempted to go in and steal, when he wouldn't even consider breaking the lock if it wasn't open; the bad guy is going to go in through the door, the window, the wall, or whatever else he can if he wants what's inside badly enough. Open source is done in the light of day, in front of everybody, and with the co-operation of many. Closed source is done behind closed doors, with the good folks at the top saying, "Trust Us; we're honest and we're the best ... because We Say So." Give me open source any day.

Some areas of software are unlikely to become OSS, and OSS creates as more jobs than it destroys, so you're probably fine. Games for example, are highly unlikely to move to OSS. Their engines anyway -- the unreal tournament games are OSS to the extent that all of the unrealscript code is available for anyone to read -- just the code for the virtual machine itself is not.

I think this because singleplayer games have no plausible service model. For multiplayer you can pay for online play, ladder access, etc. But a standalone singleplayer game doesn't have any possible tie ins. You have to get the money when they get the game.

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think."

This post was edited by Tetrazome on Sep 03, 2004.

Games for example, are highly unlikely to move to OSS.

Personally, I would take the other route: OSS is a great model for games. This is for one simple reason: you can release the source code for the game under an open-source license, but that doesn't mean you have to give the art / levels / characters / etc. away for free.

This has occurred with numerous (albeit older) games, such as Quake 2 (correct me if I'm wrong). Now that no one is buying the game, the company has released the source code for the game. They only released the source code; you must still have the game itself to obtain the data files needed to play it. In some ways, this has opened new doors for the game, as it can now be ported to modern hardware, modernized, etc.

Now, that doesn't mean that all games should be released open-sourced. But I think that gaming provides a unique opportunity for open-source software that other software genres do not have, because games are not just selling the code for the engine -- they are also selling graphics, art, characters, levels, and other data needed to use the engine. This data can be licensed to the user for a price, while the source code can be open-sourced.

I'll see your two cents, and raise you a dollar... :)